News

Many years ago the old Maplantis archive, preserved on SEN since their merger, up and vanished. Only a few people were known to have copies. Voyager was kind enough to dig through his files and scrounge up what he had.

Unfortunately, he did not have the database's index, so all of the 500+ files were named as numbers. He did manage to go through ~200 of them and give them names. I plan to sort through these at some point, but figured it'd be best to release it immediately in its current state so that anyone who really needs one of its files has the opportunity to find it.

poiuy qwert wrote:Hercanic (creator of STF) has given me permission to release the source of the STF Plugin. He originally asked me to document how to print text to screen, but has graciously let me release the full source. I hope to augment the code with some actual "tutorial" bits and maybe more in-depth descriptions of parts, but don't hold your breath.

Also note, this is old code so its not the best, and im not saying any part of it is the best way to do things, but it gets the job done and I hope it can help others. I've gone over it and heavily commented it, but If you have any questions, ask away (oh, and while i was commenting i fixed up some code to be better/easier to understand, but don't have any way to check I didn't break anything).

MPQDraft, a useful tool for making non-grafted mods that are compatible with any Starcraft version, as well as a StarEdit version of your mod for mapmaking fans, has been made open source by its original creator, Quantam. Along with MPQDraft, Quantam has released ThunderGraft's source code. If you want MP3 music in your mod instead of bulky WAV files, you want ThunderGraft.

BahamutZERO has also made available the source code of his Mac version of MPQDraft.

Voyager is hosting a fast-paced modding contest here at Modcrafters. All are invited to test their skill and creativity under the pressure of a mere 24 hour deadline. There will be no time for over-ambition -- can you handle it?

As announced by the man behind the curtain himself, Quantam has revived ThunderGraft and aims to complete the MP3 music-enabling plugin. A debug build is currently available for download.

Quantam wrote:Well, as a lot of people know, I'm primarily motivated by my whims. As it turns out, writing this pseudo-eulogy for ThunderGraft last week made me want to get it working again. So, here it is, about ready for beta-testing. And now that I'm able to compile it for the first time in many years, I can actually look at fixing bugs, if any are found.

For those who aren't familiar with it, ThunderGraft allows Diablo through Diablo II (including Starcraft and Warcraft II BNE) to use modern audio compression algorithms (those games only natively support uncompressed WAVs and WAVs compressed with a lossy 4:1 compression that noticably affects audio quality). MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC are all supported, as well as the other recent ones (the only common one it doesn't support is MP4). Save for FLAC (which is lossless), these allow for superior quality and less than 1/2 the file size compared to compressed WAVs, or about 1/4 the file size for the same quality.

To preempt a couple questions:

This is a debug build. Like all the other debug builds, it produces debug log files. They're now, however, in the temp directory for your Windows user.

There are some really strange problems with this and FireGraft, and it currently does not work with FireGraft. I'm talking with DiscipleOfAdun about it.

You should read the readme, as it contains some info that will help avoid certain problems.

Also, in the process of getting this thing working again I found 5 different MPQDraft bugs, which I'm really surprised nobody mentioned to me in the last 6 months (2 of them were major, and all of them were pretty stupid little mistakes). There will be a new build of MPQDraft in the very near future.